New Mexico (Location Key)

New Mexico goes through a story of its own across the course of the 5 texts that mention it. Santa Fe is a frontier town in Light in August, only recently acquired by the U.S. as one of the prizes of the Mexican War, when Nathaniel Burrington and his family go there looking for someone to officiate at their wedding. It would still have been a U.S. territory forty years later when Jack Houston herds sheep there during his twelve-year journey through the West in The Hamlet. It's been a state for about thirty years when Don Boyd (in "Delta Autumn") and Roth McCaslin (in Go Down, Moses) spend six weeks living there with an unnamed mistress. And the last time it appears, in Requiem for a Nun, it's again the frontier - a place to which a number of the Confederate soldiers who refuse to accept the South's surrender at Appomattox are heading.